Charles Randall Paul is a former commercial real estate developer who has taken on a pretty serious challenge—trying to forge productive and peaceful relationships among political and religious rivals. His new startup, The World Table, intends to use the power of the Internet to facilitate this discussion.
What is the change you’re trying to make in the world?
Teach a new generation that they can respect and admire their critics, and engage peacefully with their trustworthy religious and political rivals.
What was the genesis for The World Table?
The Foundation for Religious Diplomacy was seeking a way to help millions of people desire and learn how to live as a trustworthy rival, and the idea of building a better comment system on the Internet became a good place to gain traction. So we started a public benefit corporation in the software-as-a-service sector to begin the work.
The Foundation for Religious Diplomacy was seeking a way to help millions of people desire and learn how to live as a trustworthy rival, and the idea of building a better comment system on the Internet became a good place to gain traction. So we started a public benefit corporation in the software-as-a-service sector to begin the work.
We began our company with an ethical foundation we call The Way of Openness (TWO). It is a ten-point set of attitudes and skills that have been proven to promote honest, kind and authentic mutual communication on difficult subjects. It is required for anyone who joins our organization to pledge to follow TWO. Eventually all Internet users of The World Table will want to follow TWO to improve their communications and reputations for trustworthiness.
You also founded the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy with a mission to build trust and friendship between religious rivals—a pretty tall order. How’s it going?
We have initiatives working slowly in Egypt, Israel, Iran and the USA. Each is based on private heart-to-heart dialogue between opinion leaders who then can ask their communities to change their attitudes. This work needs so much support. If The World Table succeeds we will have the funds to bring opponents and critics together on the web and in person in numbers we have never imagined.
What’s the biggest change you’ve made in your professional life?
Working as a real estate developer to build buildings for a customer with a two or three year time budget was so different from working to develop relations of trust between rivals that do not particularly want to do it. There is no clear plan for all participants and no strict time frame. It is a greater vision, but it lacks a clear path to accomplishment.
Personal life?
I got married. Then I almost lost my marriage. Then I really came to know how much I wanted to keep my family together. Then I shifted from profit to nonprofit work, then to work for a public benefit corporation that has both profit and nonprofit goals. All these were big personal changes.
Change is hard—do you have any tricks you’d like to share for making it easier?
I have found that things don’t go as well as I expect nor as badly as I expect. Change is thus something to be embraced with equanimity.
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I would be someone who keeps his focus on what matters most all the time. I would enjoy life in all its facets, yet without being distracted from my chosen missions. This seems a godlike way to be.
When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
In my teen years ... a wealthy businessman like my father and a saintly religious leader like my father and an influential public intellectual and a guy that women couldn’t resist.
What did you eat for breakfast this morning?
A smoothie with spinach, mangoes, peaches, cinnamon, protein powder and coconut milk.
What are you reading right now?
The Stillborn God by Mark Lilla
Who inspires you?
My children and their spouses who are raising their kids with more diligence and love than I did. They have more balance to their lives—keeping spirituality and work and family and recreation and public service in mind. This without being too distracted by media or the troubles of life.
Rock, paper, or scissors?
Scissors—the aesthetic of two sharp edges coming together for a useful purpose. Proverbs 27:17
What is your secret vice?
I can’t say and keep it secret. I am too often distracted by beauty and pleasure from deeper beauty and difficult pleasure—the latter being more valuable to me.
Who is the most progressive business leader you know?
Probably Pope Francis if you consider his gig a big non-profit enterprise.
What’s one question you’d like to ask yourself—and answer?
Have we as unique individual persons always existed in some intelligent, purposeful form (before this universe began even) and will we continue to exist as persons in some form ad infinitum?